MediaMax Reborn as TheLinkUp--"The social network for file sharing"

This past Sunday, a developers' blog announced the launch of The Linkup. This is actually the second reincarnation of what was originally called Streamload, an online file storage service. After Streamload came MediaMax, a nice service for storing media files online a la AOL Xdrive, complete with music players and picture viewers.

This site may earn affiliate commissions from the links on this page. Terms of use.

This past Sunday, a developers' blog announced the launch of The Linkup. This is actually the second reincarnation of what was originally called Streamload, an online file storage service. After Streamload came MediaMax, a nice service for storing media files online a la AOL Xdrive, complete with music players and picture viewers.

And now the service has fallen prey to the need for every piece of software on earth to include "social networking" in its mission statement. The new site claims that existing MediaMax accounts will work in The Linkup, and, "Many of your MediaMax files are already in your The Linkup account, and the rest will be there shortly." None of mine were...

Despite the new SN slant, the service looks a lot less feature-rich than MediaMax, with no players; and I couldn't upload a file without errors. I'm not alone here, as comment replies to the blog post will attest.

And as far as social networking features are concerned, The Linkup has many miles to go before it resembles Facebook or MySpace in any way, shape, or form. There are no updates, not much of a rich profile--it's pretty much just file storing and sharing. I guess you gotta talk the talk for that venture capital, whether it has anything to do with product features or not. On the plus side, the service now claims to offer "unlimited" storage space, with individual file sizes up to 2GB.

If you're looking for a file storage site that actually does include some social features, check out Freedrive. This one has links with Facebook and the like, can play videos on your page, and even has a public commons of files you can graze on.